Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (52 page)

In
her five active years with UNICEF, she made innumerable field trips to many of
the one hundred twenty-eight countries the organization sponsors, including
Bangladesh, the Sudan, Ethiopia, El Salvador, and Vietnam.

Wolders
arranged for the trips, checking timetables and coordinating the numerous
connecting flights. “I could never have done all of this work with UNICEF
without Robbie,” she said. “There’s no way. Apart from my personal
feelings, there’s just no way the job could have been done. Robbie’s on the
phone the whole bloody time! He’s the one who gets the flights, for free.
UNICEF can’t pay for hotels and other things. He’s marvelous at it. Sometimes
he cajoles airlines for UNICEF needs. He does a million things. When we get to
a town where I have to speak the next day, he’ll go and check the room and the
mike, and he’ll listen to what I’m going to say, and he’ll tell me, ‘No, that
isn’t right,’ or `It’s okay,‘ or whatever. And we have each other to talk
to.”

A
week after she joined UNICEF in 1988, she headed for Ethiopia, which was being
ravaged by starvation and a civil war. “In the beginning, I knew my role
was `the lure.” Starvation in third-world countries was not hot
copy,“ she said. ”I think the powers-that-be rightly thought that I
might be able to attract a little attention. All those reclusive years helped
too! If I had been seen all over the place—except in my backyard in
Switzerland, weeding—I wouldn’t be quite the right snare. But laying low all
those years made me a curiosity.

“When
I finally accepted the job, I had no idea what I was getting into. The whole
thing terrified me. It still does. Since we started, it’s really been
full-time. I don’t mean every minute, or even every week, but while we’re away
in the countries we’re busy from dawn to… well, dawn. We’re on the go the
whole time.”

Although
UNICEF officials would have been content if Audrey had functioned merely as a
figurehead leader, that was never the case. From the moment she signed on, she
went into the field, meeting with the starving children whose message of
despair she hoped to carry to the rest of the world. She often slept in the
refugee camps with the disenfranchised, sharing their meager meals with them.
Completely hands-on in her approach, she raised the consciousness of millions
of people about countries they never knew existed.

“Speaking
to the officials and the delegates back at the United Nations is very important
too. You have to be responsible. You can’t just get up and say, `Oh, I’m happy
to be here, and I love children,‘ ” she told the novelist and journalist
Dominick Dunne in 1991. “No, that’s not enough. It’s not even enough to
know there’s been a flood in Bangladesh and seven thousand people lost their
lives. Why the flood? What is their history? Why are they one of the poorest
countries today? How are they going to survive? Are they getting enough help?
What are the statistics? What are their problems?”

She
held press conferences wherever she went to make sure newspapers carried
reports of what she had learned and what she had witnessed. “I do not want
to see Ethiopians digging graves for their children any longer,” she
emphasized. In El Salvador, she spoke the words of Gandhi: “Wars cannot be
won by bullets, but only by bleeding hearts.”

In
1991, President George Bush gave Audrey the highest honor any individual can
receive in the United States—the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “I will
not rest until no child goes hungry,” she said. “All is
possible.”

Madeline
Eisner, a UNICEF official who accompanied Audrey on her last mission to Somalia
in September of 1992, recalled that she wanted to visit as many refugee centers
and clinics as was humanly possible. “She insisted on seeing the worst of
the worst,” Eisner said. “She didn’t flinch. You could sense she felt
it was her duty, and her destiny.”

“I
walked right into a nightmare,” Audrey recalled about Somalia.
“Ethiopia had been brutally bad, but Somalia was beyond belief. No stories
in the press could prepare me for what I saw. The unspeakable agony of it! I
kept seeing these countless little, fragile, emaciated children sitting under
the trees, waiting to be fed. There wasn’t food, yet they waited. Most of them
were very ill—dying, I guess. I’ll never forget their huge eyes in tiny faces
and the terrible silence.”

Somalia
was indeed different.

Thanks
in many ways to Audrey’s tireless efforts and rare talent for using her glamour
to focus the world’s attention on its most destitute, Somalia was not to be
forgotten. CNN, the TV networks, and the rest of the world’s media brought home
daily images of cruelty, carnage, and the haunting, sunken eyes of children
starving slowly to death. Something had to be done.

In
an unprecedented action, President Bush, in the waning days of his
administration, dispatched thousands of U.S. troops to Somalia to quell the violence,
restore civil order, and distribute food. Mass starvation came to an immediate
halt. While the military and political implications of “Operation Restore
Hope” have yet to be sorted out at this writing, the purely humanitarian
motive of its mission marks a new chapter in the use of military power.

Audrey
had moved millions with her movies. Now she had moved a president, a nation,
and the world to action in what would be the last triumphant performance of her
public career.